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How Often
Should My Dog Receive Vaccinations ?

What Vaccinations
Should My Dog Get ?

Ron Hines DVM PhD

Times change and this older article of mine needed to change too. No need to read it. Instead:

Read about the problems that can be brought on by too big a vaccine dose here.

How
Long Will It Be Before My Pet Is Protected ?

It
can take a full 14 days after vaccination before your should trust that your
pet is fully protected. The vaccine itself does not protect your
dog. Your pet must make antibodies of it's own to the virus or bacterial product that was introduced by the vaccine. That is why vaccination
just before boarding or exposure to a disease is a waste of time.

Does
The Quality of Vaccines Differ ?

Yes,
products sold in feed stores are often of lower quality. When these
stores sell Nationally respected brands, the products have been
diverted from legitimate sales to veterinarians. In that case, there
is always the risk that they may not have been shipped or stored
properly. Many vaccines contain live, but weakened, disease organisms.
Those organisms must be living to be effective. If vaccines are
stored in areas that are too warm, or exposed to too much sunlight,
they can loose their effectiveness. (ref
1, ref
2)

Do
We Give Our Pets Too Many Vaccines?

Yes.

Just like children, puppies need vaccination at the proper time
or they will be susceptible to illnesses. But yearly vaccination for many disease is
entirely too often. Please read an article on the subject regarding cats. (ref) The same facts about over-vaccination
apply to dogs. We are just luck that dogs don't get the number of
vaccination-associated tumors that cats do.

The
exceptions are vaccine against leptospirosis,
which seem to only last a year and vaccination against kennel cough
(which last six months to a year)
and vaccinations against Lyme disease. When your pet is likely to
be exposed to these pathogens, it will need booster vaccinations
at regular intervals. However, injecting these foreign-protein containing
products into your pet is not without risk so you should consider
how likely exposure really is in your pet's specific case. Sometimes
the risks out weight the possible benefits. Kennel cough is not
a fatal disease. Leptospirosis usually requires exposure to stagnant
standing water, wildlife or vermin (rats)
- so the risk to a pet like an indoor poodle is low, while the risk
to a dog taken into rural settings is much higher. The risk to your
pets also increases when you or your neighbors feed urban wildlife
(raccoons).

Some
owners give their pets Lyme disease vaccine
every year. Pets get this disease from ticks. If you are very fearful
of catching it from your pet, that is a valid option. But my suggestion
is that before you decide, see if there is actually a high incidence
of Lyme disease in pets or wildlife where you live. You can view
a map of the areas of the United States where your pet is most likely
to be exposed to Lyme disease here.
We know that Lyme
vaccine has the potential of causing adverse effects including generalized
arthritis, allergy and other immune diseases, so it should not be
given needlessly.

Another
commonly administered vaccine is for kennel
cough (bordetella, etc.).
This is usually a mild and transient disease - often contracted
during boarding or grooming or at dog shows. Your pet may not need
this vaccine since not all pets visit breeding or boarding kennels,
most do not go to dog shows and most pets have only occasional contact
with dogs outside their immediate family. Also, the immunity this
vaccine imparts is quite short-lived. I recommend this vaccine only
when owners anticipate a likely exposure. I suggest it more frequently
in toy breeds in which coughing can persist for quite some time
due to the narrow tracheas (windpipe)
common in these breeds. These small pets also tend to spend more
time at the groomer and kennels where kennel cough disease lurks.

What
Are Adjuvants ?

Adjuvants
are compounds that are added to vaccines in an attempt to increase
their effectiveness. I no longer use vaccines that contain them
because they have caused so many side effects. Several companies
offers a non-adjuvanted 3-year vaccines. This is the vaccine that
I most often use in dogs. It appears to contain none of the adjuvants
that might increase the chances of cancer or immunological disease later in life.
I would prefer that your pet receive a rabies
vaccine that also contains no adjuvants. But even non-adjuvanted
injectable vaccines are not risk-free. If your dog has had prior
vaccine reactions, think seriously before having any vaccines administered
and be sure that your veterinarian jots down the brand name and
lot number of the vaccines that have been given.

When
Should My Puppy Get It's Shots ?

1) At 12 weeks of age, have a low-volume (ie low traffic) animal hospital with a vet you trust or a mobile house call vet come to your home and give the pet the first of its 3 injections against the core diseases I mentioned earlier (never including lepto in these initial vaccinations). Remember that veterinary waiting rooms, like ER waiting rooms, can be great places to catch the flu as well as to recover from it - don't introduce your new pet to the rest of the crowd.

2) At 14 weeks of age, have your pet receive a booster vaccination with the same vaccine.

3) At 16-18 weeks have it repeated.

4) One year from then, have your pet receive a booster vaccination for its core diseases. In dogs and cats with normal immune systems, there is no need to repeat them for at least 7 years.

5) If you obtain a healthy adult pet with an unknown vaccination history, a single vaccination is sufficient.

I
generally give the intranasal kennel cough (bordatella)
vaccines at 12 and 18 weeks of age. At 12-16 weeks of age I give
puppies a killed three-year rated rabies virus vaccination (such as Merial's Imrab-1).

Veterinary opinions
differ on when to give these vaccinations. But my schedule has
worked well for me and my clients. When I do see these diseases in puppies, it is generally because they were already incubating the diseases before their first vaccination.

What
Vaccinations Should My Adult Pet Get ?

With
the exceptions I have mentioned (Kennel Cough,
Leptospirosis, Lyme) adult dogs do not need to be vaccinated
more than every 7 years.

Rabies
is a special cases.The problem are state laws that mandate yearly
rabies vaccination. You need to obey those laws for the benefit
of the human and dog-population of your State as a whole. If States
allowed exceptions, rabies could get out of control. Several
rabies vaccines are federally certified for three years of protection
(such
as )
. However, many states disregard these federal guidelines and require
yearly vaccination. When yearly rabies vaccination is mandated,
I prefer thiomersal-free,
non-adjuvanted vaccine.

Until recently, veterinarians simply gave all dogs booster shots
every year. This is what the vaccine manufacturers suggested. Besides,
it brought our clientele back to our animal hospitals yearly, which
increased our income and gave us the opportunity to detect problems
early before the owners were aware of them. Most veterinarians do
a thorough physical examination on pets at the time of their yearly
vaccinations and we often detect problems during the exam. Also,
by law, many states require a yearly rabies vaccination even though
studies have shown that many of the rabies vaccines we use give
us three years of protection.

Many
veterinarians, myself included, were suspicious that the vaccines
we used were giving much longer periods of protection than one year.
We knew this because we never saw distemper, hepatitis or parvovirus
disease in dogs that had been vaccinated - even many years earlier.

Part
of the problem involved the typical fee structures of veterinary
practices. We tended to undercharge for complex surgery and subsidize
those procedures with the money we earn on yearly vaccinations.
I do not know how this practice came about, but it has existed at
least since the 1950’s. There was also an incentive for vaccine
manufacturers to sell more vaccine if boosters were recommended
annually. There was also a one-year mind set among the staff the
USDA and FDA. It has been taken to the extreme, to the point where
there is now a two-year expiration date on a vial of water.

There
are many risks associated with too frequent vaccinations. For one,
the immune system of your pet is stressed by these vaccinations.
Occasional dogs develop allergic reactions, facial swelling, stomach
and intestinal upsets, mopiness, fevers, itching, nausea and coughing
after they receive a shot. But we also suspect that vaccinations
trigger certain autoimmune diseases such as Addison’s disease
in dogs.

Occasionally
these reactions are life threatening (ref).
Vaccines contain many ingredients besides the dried virus. Some
of these, antibiotics and adjuvants (enhancers) are implicated in
vaccine reactions. If I am suspicious that a dog might have a reaction
to a particular vaccine, I pre-administer antihistamines (Benadryl)
and give a minute test dose of 0.05ml. If the dog is normal thirty
minutes after the test dose, I give it the remaining one-milliliter. However, even this small test dose has caused reactions in some
animals.

Newer
Information

In
a 2007study (ref)
, scientists studied the lengh of time vaccination immunity (immunological
memmory) persisted in humans. We know that the immune
system's memmory in all mammals, cats-dogs-and-people is very similar. (ref)
Measles, for example, is a virus very much like distemper of dogs. (ref)
The immunity confired by a two-dose series measles vaccine lasts
a human lifetime. Vaccina (cow pox),
mumps, Epstein-Barr virus, varicella/zoster and rubella also last
a lifetime; tetanus 11, years, diphteria 19yrs. So although no studies
have followed dogs or cats that long, veterinarians have no reason
to suspect that their immunity would be shorter lasting.